The Turntable kit safely negotiated a stormy English Channel along with myself, my car and a lot of other railway bits and pieces. To be honest, the crossing from Portsmouth to Caen was a piece of cake - Brittany Ferries' latest ship, the Armorique, behaved extremely well and I slept for most of the 5-12 hour crossing. I have always used the Tunnel in wintertime but my loathing of the M25 has finally been replaced by a new trust in surface vessels! OK, on with the show.

I am following both the instructions from Dave Smith and the RMWeb Thread by JeffP. JeffP has made some interesting observations and I agree with at least the first few. In fact I had also decided to start with the Turntable Installation Module as this will allow me to finish the cabinetry and baseboards as soon as is practicable.

Actually having the instructions to hand meant that I could getter a better understanding of how the module can be fitted into the IKEA cabinetry. There will have to be some trimming of the various module pieces, but I have limited the amount of cutting by moving the position of the module 20mm to the left. This was accomplished by adding some strip wood onto the right hand MDF baseboard. Eventually I will have to take 20mm off the left hand baseboard but there is no hurry to do that.

I also removed the rear IKEA rail from the central unit and cut back the hardboard rear panel. I may have to remove the front rail but until I am certain of this it can stay where it is. I have noted that the upper right door hinge to this cabinet is definitely in the way and some surgery is going to be required.

Befor starting Step 1 I made sure I had all the pieces. At first I could not find the pre-formed race rails but these are cleverly hidden within the grooved drive disk. Unfortunately I had already sent Dave Smith an email before I discovered them, so I quickly sent a follow up email. Sorry, Dave!

The kit after unpacking:

Step 1 is the subject of this entry. I attached the middle board to the lower board with 20 screws and 8mm spacers. The screws pass through the middle board, then the spacer and then into the lower board, the holes of which are a tight fit so that the screws cut their own threads. 16 screws around the well, plus one in each corner. I chose to use the inner corner holes which turns out to be correct.

This photo also shows the 8 "dished" plywood pieces placed into the base of the well:

The plywood was then glued down and held with appropriate weights:

The base is now ready to attach the circular race rails, the subject of my next two posts.